Nineteen elementary school students, categorized into one of two groups, participated in this study.  There were 10 bilingual students consisting of 5 males and five females.  The ages ranged from 9 to 11, with a mean of 9.7 and a standard deviation of .82.  There were 9 monolingual students in the second group consisting of 5 males, and 4 females.  The ages ranged from 9 to 11, with a mean of 10.1 and a standard deviation of .78.  The 10 bilingual students spoke English as a second language, 5 of whom were born outside of the USA.  First languages included Spanish, Ukranian, Creole, Serbocroatian, Chinese, and Korean.
    This study was designed to determine if bilingual children used certain metamemory strategies more often than monolinguals.  An overall average of Vocabulary scores was recorded on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-III) (Dunn & Dunn, 1997).  There was also an overall average recorded in each of the two groups on the Metamemory Battery Assessment.  An Independent Samples T-test was used to analyze the differences between the metamemory strategies of both the monolingual and bilingual groups.
    Results indicated a statistical significant difference on the PPVT-III between the two groups, t(17)= -2.32, p=0.02. Monolinguals scored higher on the receptive vocabulary test than their bilingual peers as shown in table 1.

Table 1
Mean scores and standard deviation for the PPVT-III
 
 

	N	Mean	Std.Deviation
Bilingual	10	94.10	8.91
Monolingual	9	103.22	8.14

Although the monolingual group performed significantly better on receptive vocabulary, should we may assume they will perform better on tests of other cognitive abilities.  To evaluate these competing ideas, participants’ responses to specific metamemory tasks were analyzed.
    Though there were no overall significant differences in metamemory strategies between the two groups, there were specific memory tasks on which the bilinguals and monolinguals performed differently, t(17)= -.10,p= .46.  The mean scores and standard deviations of the two groups on the Metamemory Battery are shown in table 2.

Table 2
Independent Samples T-Test for Total Metamemory Assessment
 
 

	N	Mean	Std. Deviation
Bilingual	10	22.40	2.79
Monolingual	9	22.61	5.59

*Note: Equal variance is assumed

    Participants in the bilingual group showed a significant difference on part 2 of the Metamemory Assessment, t(17)= 2.45, p=0.01.  Bilinguals scored higher on “rote paraphrase”, which assesses awareness of the relative ease of gist recall over rote recall shown in table 3.

Table 3
Means and Standard Deviations for the “rote paraphrase” subset of the Metamemory Battery Assessment
 

	N	Mean	Std. Deviation
Bilingual	10	6.0	.00
Monolingual	9	3.78	2.91

*Note: Equal variance is assumed

    Monolingual participants, on the other hand, showed a significant advantage on part 4 of the Metamemory Battery Assessment (Dunn & Dunn, 1997).  Monolinguals out-performed the bilingual group on ‘preparation event’, which assesses planful behavior in preparing for future events, t(17)=-1.80, p=.04, as shown in table 4.
 

Table 4
Means and Standard Deviations for the “preparation event” subset of the Metamemory Battery Assessment
 

	N	Mean	Std. Deviation
Bilingual	10	2.2	.63
Monolingual	9	3.11	1.45

*Note: Equal variance is assumed

There were no significant differences on each of the remaining 6 subsets of the Metamemory Assessment Battery.  The two groups performed equally on, preparation object, retrieval object, story-list, opposites-arbitrary, strategy-specific knowledge, and memory monitoring.